


Pretension so thick (you could cut it with a knife)

by Companionable



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Abandonment, Blood Drinking, F/F, Vampires, alcohol mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 08:18:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2844296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Companionable/pseuds/Companionable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been only a few years since Rythian stopped breathing and began living the undead life, but already he's settled into a (lonely) routine. Luckily, he's got someone looking out for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretension so thick (you could cut it with a knife)

**Author's Note:**

> another UMY addition from me, featuring my favourite performative loser and all his presentational quirks being gutted by EVERYONE around him. he's not nearly the enigma he thinks he is, and zoey is incredibly tolerant of him.

The bar is seedy and dark, as it always is, as it needs to be. The lights are dim and the bodies that move within it are of two distinct natures: either they glide silent and graceful across the floor, or they stumble and trip their way towards the bar. The first are of Rythian’s kind. The rest are his prey, those he is fated to feed upon, the bodies that sustain his miserable life...

“Oi, Rythian. Earth to Rythian, I’ve got your B pos’ here.”

Ravs shoves a mug of thick, oxidized blood at him, which he curls his lip at under his concealing accessory, the scarf that covers his fanged mouth. The stench of it is simultaneously revolting and undeniably enticing, punctuated with curls of the steaming magic keeping the blood from congealing that rise and make Rythian’s nose tingle with a sensation akin to carbonation. With furtive glances to either side of him at the bar, he tugs the scarf down, exposing the sharpened canines that are emblematic of the disease he suffers through. He brings the mug to his lips, relishes that he has not had to pierce skin to taste the blood within, but incongruously misses the feeling of puncturing a neck, of hunting and feeding as his nature requires. Replacing the scarf, he puts the mug back and says to the barkeep, “Thank you, Ravs. You run an admirable establishment.”

Ravs, taking a bleached cloth to a mug to clean it of leftover blood, scoffs. “I’ve only taken over for a mate when he got sick of the smell of blood. I’m no saint.”

“Still,” Rythian continues, gesturing to the rest of the bar, “this is a refuge for creatures of the night, and provides us the option to live against our nature to kill and maim, an opportunity to exist in tandem with our natural prey without putting them in danger. It’s a blessing.”

Ravs grunts. “Sure, mate. Whatever you say.” He moves away, towards the cooler to get another patron her order.

Casting his eyes over the other customers, Rythian wonders how many of his siblings of the night have spent several decades coming to this establishment, partaking of its selection of fresh bloodpacs for perhaps as long as bloodpacs have existed, maybe even had personal involvement in the bar’s very beginning. Rich histories, cultured vampires having lived for centuries, watching humanity grow and develop around them and feeling fascinated by their tenacity and entranced by the life force moving them forward. The eternal curse of this dark order. He pulls his scarf down to take another sip from his mug.

“Oi, Ravsy!” calls a patron to Rythian’s other side, a tall vampire with close cropped brown hair and droopy, friendly eyes. “Mug o’ AB pos, mate. Warm as you can make it.”

Rythian peers up at him sidelong, tucking his chin further down into his scarf. How old could this brother be? He seems well adjusted, his clothing choices appropriate for the mid-twenties age he appears, perhaps only a few decades. Or maybe he’d been a particularly active predator, observing the changes in the times through his various and plentiful victims. Rythian wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he’d been turned in the regency, and merely coped remarkably well with the passage of time. He decides he admires this vampire, his stubbornness, his courage and drive. He goes to open his mouth to ask him to have a drink with him, but a voice interrupts him.

“Kogie’s not much older than you. Two decades turned, at most. He’s nothing special.”

Rythian whirls around to stare at this girl who’s dropped in out of thin air. Her hair is cropped short, her clothes bright and loud in the blacked-out blood bar. “Pardon me?” he asks, not having the space of mind to say much of anything else.

“Also he’s in a nerd-band with a siren, a blood mage and a rock nymph. They’re not bad, if you’re into the whole ‘literally having a glamour cast on you as you listen’ scene.”

He stares at her with wide eyes, wondering what this human girl would be doing in a place like this, and know as much as she does. A thought strikes him, information gleaned from his sire on one of the few visits he paid her. “Are you a Twilighter? Because I’m not into that sort of thing.”

She sputters out a laugh, giggling and snorting before looking at him. “Do I look like a vampire groupie to you, dummy?” While she smells distinctly of human, she doesn’t smell like she’s been drained, and certainly not with any frequency. The blood-lockers he’s seen in the thrall of more aggressive vampires always smell a bit like rotten trash. Overused and under-cared for.

“How do you know so much, then?”

“Oh, I’m a regular here!”

Now it’s his turn to splutter. “Y-you’re--But you’re human. I can smell it on you. I thought this was a fae-bar?”

She lifts herself up to rest on a bar stool, resting an elbow on the bartop, looking at him with innocent curiosity. He knows enough fae to recognize that not all that looks innocent truly is. He buries his nose into his scarf. “It is. It’s also the only place I can get my lounge on where the Trash Fae won’t try to wheedle their king’s future out of me. That got annoying really fast.”

He looks her up and down, and finally the whiff of magic on her tickles his nose. Without thinking about it, he scoffs. “You. A Seer?” he says a little incredulously.

“Oh, shut up!” she says. She turns the top of the seat around and waves Ravs down for an orange juice. When she’s done ordering, her gaze is less friendly. “I don’t have to prove myself to you, but I can.” She makes a gesture at him, for him to lay his dark palm in hers.

He pulls his hand away from her despite not being close enough to touch. “Thank you, but I’m fine. Vampires don’t have a future. There’s nothing to See.”

She laughs again, into her orange juice as she sips it. All of her menace from before is gone. “You’re awfully bleak, aren’t you?”

“I choose to self-describe as ‘realistic’.”

“Nah,” she says dismissively, “you’re being a sad, soppy pessimist, and I’m pretty sure you know it. Besides,” she tacks on, dropping her empty glass to the bartop, “you’re here, aren’t you? Living and existing and making choices?” The girl pauses, looking at him expectantly as she tucks a hair behind her ear, and he realizes she’s waiting for him to nod. He does. “Choices mean change, and change means future. I don’t See what _will_ be, I See where your path currently leads.”

She’s dropping cash on the table and hopping down for the barstool, and Rythian feels incongruously upset to see her go, and not because she’s the source of his continued, harrowing existence, but because he hasn’t talked to anyone like this since he turned. He reaches for her, but thinks better of it, retracts his hand and says, instead, “And where does my path currently lead?”

She’s in the middle of the bar, surrounded by other patrons of his own affliction, gliding past her and around her as if she weren’t even there, as if she had dropped in out of the sky like a lone raindrop on a cloudless day, unseen and unnoticed. The light from the doorway as it opens silhouettes her, and she smiles hugely at him when she turns. “Better places, now that you’ve met me,” is her reply, and she walks out the entrance and into the sun where he cannot tread, bearing the light upon her skin better than he ever could while he lived.

He thinks, briefly, that she is radiant, then sips again at his mug of B positive and watches the rest of the crowd.

 

* * *

 

It’s not until he’s there again the next day that he realizes he never got her name, and wants to lock himself inside his blacked out apartment for a few years until he can remember how human interaction works again. He feels far more as though he’s been undead for centuries, as opposed to less than five years, and has to remind himself that he wasn’t the most socially adept when his heart beat in his chest, that something like that wouldn’t change when it stopped.

He flags Ravs down for AB today, and tries to bring it up as casually as he can when Ravs delivers. “Hey, Ravs, you don’t... D’you remember the girl I was talking to yesterday? Rather short, bright red hair, white streak?”

“You mean literally the only person I’ve ever seen you talk to since you started coming here?” he says, looking Rythian dead in the eye as he bleaches a mug. Rythian pouts at him under his scarf, and Ravs sighs. “Of course I do, you fang-toothed idiot. That’s Zoey, she’s a regular, I see her here all the time.”

“But she’s not a fae or a vampire or a blood-locker.”

Ravs looks at him deadpan again. “Ryth, do you think I could stop humans who have reached the drinking age from entering every bar in the city? They’re not going to listen to unwritten, unspoken rules about where faeries hold their court. They just want booze. I’m happy to oblige if they can pay up; I’m just a bit less cloak-and-dagger about the other beverages I serve.” He brings the mug he’s cleaning up to his eye, then digs the bleached cloth into the bottom to scratch at a stain with a pointed finger. “She’s a Seer anyway, that counts for me. Plus, this is one of the few thresholds in the city the Garbage Court hasn’t managed to charm their way into, thanks to the heavy duty charms the old man worked into the floorboards.”

Rythian pulls his scarf down to drink the blood, wrinkling his nose at the tingle of magic. “Why does she hate them so much?”

“Ha! S’not hate, mate. It’s common sense. The Garbage Court didn’t get that name for nothin’. I heard it had something to do with their mismanaged King of Misrule. Wanting to know his fate so they can... I don’t know, accelerate it or something, probably.” Ravs shrugs, hangs the mug up behind him. “Who knows what fae want? I only do because I make them tell me.”

Another patron flags him down and Ravs excuses himself to help them, leaving Rythian to contemplate the Seer who’d enchanted him yesterday. In his time since rising from his grave to wander the earth anew, his company had been sparse at best. His sire had left him after only a few months of instruction, an abandonment that had left Rythian bereft and confused. It was months of starvation that pushed him into finally slaking his thirst and taking his first life since he rose, and months more from guilt after that. He’d wandered, dazed and delirious into a hospital, following the smell of blood, and collapsed there when he finally lost consciousness. He was lucky one of the nurses at the desk was a banshee familiar with vampires and got him a transfusion without much trouble. He hadn’t had much company since then. Subconsciously, in remembering, he buries his nose deeper into his scarf, scowling and playing with his mug absently.

“Uh oh,” tuts a voice next to him, “looks like someone’s being a sad little broody downer, isn’t he?”

Rythian perks up to hear her voice again, and sees the Seer perched carefully on the barstool next to him once again. His delight startles him, then he registers what she’s said. “Hey, I do not _brood_.”

She fully snorts at him. “I mean, I guess I can’t just whip out a mirror to show you, but, seriously, your picture would be in the dictionary under ‘brooding’ if it’d show up, with synonyms listed as ‘sulking’, ‘skulking’, and ‘whinging’.” She leans in and picks with an extended finger at the edge of his scarf. “Speaking of which, why do you wear this thing? It’s April, you doofus--”

Without meaning to, he smacks her hand away with full force, immediately wincing at the sound it makes. “I--Sorry. I just, I don’t like... I’m not comfortable w-with. With them,” he stutters out vaguely, gesturing at his mouth.

She cradles her hand, but shrugs. “Alright, sorry for prying.” There’s silence that Rythian doesn’t feel comfortable filling, but she solves that problem for him. “Y’wanna come back to mine?”

“What.”

“I’ve got to get back to look after the plants, I was wondering if you wanted to have tea while I do.”

It’s bare and honest and the shock of it almost burns him. “Uh, sure?”

She smiles, big and bright. “Awesome! You can meet everyone. Bill and Herbert and Freddy and Allen Woodley and Ellen Dooley--”

He halts, just inside the door of Ravs’ bar. “Who?”

“The mushrooms, obviously!” she says, as though that were the only possible answer. “Hank and Frank haven’t been feeling great lately, but I’m sure they’d love company, and Old Man Timothy too--oh, and Commander Spots and his fleet of Friendly Fungi! They’ll all cheer you right up, I can tell. Fifi and Teep will be happy to meet you too, after I’ve talked about you so much.”

They step out into the dark of the city’s night from the alleyway that leads to the bar, Rythian following her lead while she rambles. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, tucks his chin in, and mutters, “I’m Rythian, by the way.”

She looks at him over her shoulder as she walks, avoiding hydrants without looking at them. “Oh, I know.”

“What,” he says again.

“What sort of Seer would I be, if I didn’t know the names of everyone I was bound to meet?” He can feel his face screw up, and she laughs at him. “That, and Ravs talks about you a lot. ‘Broody son-of-a-bitch with the douche-y blond streak and pretentious scarf, who does Rythian think he is, the only vampire in my bar?’” she imitates, affecting a terrible Scottish accent before dissolving into giggles.

Rythian crosses his arms. “I don’t brood...”

“And I’m Zoey, but Ravs already told you that. So, nice to meet you properly, I hope you’re ready to meet all the kids.”

She turns to walk up the stairs to a cramped looking apartment building, and he watches as she fumbles with the doorknob before switching hands, using the one Rythian hadn’t hit to turn it. She leads him up the walk-up to the third floor, cracking open the door with an awkward twist of her key, before swinging it wide open.

“Come on in, Broody, make yourself at home!”

He nods at the invitation, feeling the (fairly weak) threshold bend beneath his entrance and he gets a good look at...

“Sorry it’s such a mess, you’d think chronic insomnia would make for more productivity, but it usually just makes for more prophecies hastily scribbled on the back of take-away receipts.”

It _is_ fairly messy, soil tracked all over the multiple tables and flat surfaces that house pots full of mushrooms of varying sizes, and journals with pens tucked in them scattered in various stages of use on any other available flat surface, mostly the floor in corners and on top of or under the coffee table. Any other spare space is occupied by empty take-away containers and dirty dishes. The small kitchen is full of more fungi and dirty dishes, a set of pet food dishes beside the garbage can at one end of the counter. There are three doors leading away from the living room (which houses a couch littered with yet more journals and pens sticking up out of the cushions), to what he presumes are a guest room, a bathroom, and Zoey’s own room.

Rythian takes a few more steps, careful to avoid scattered paper with important looking writing on it. “Uh, thank you.” He looks around at the mess as Zoey steps past to flick the switch on the electric kettle, then shrugs his hands back into his pockets. “You going to introduce me, or...?” he offers, and she brightens from the kitchen.

“Oh, of course! How rude of me, I’m sorry I’m not a great host, we’ve only just moved in recently, I used to be much more remote. Anyway, over here we have the loyal Mr and Mrs Schulz, and those over there are their rowdy neighbours...”

It takes a good half hour for her to go through and list all of the mushrooms by name, a fact that Rythian doesn’t feel comfortable questioning her wisdom on, as she stops to check in with each one of them about their lives and connections, solving their “problems” with a few words before moving on to the next. He hopes she won’t check to make sure he remembers all of them, as he’s fairly certain he won’t come even close, but there’s a scratching at the door and Zoey perks up out of her conversation with the last, who Rythian thinks might have been called Nathan.

“Oh, they’re late, must’ve had fun at the park,” Zoey mutters as she makes for the door, opening it to let in an excitable looking pitbull who leaps up at her happily. “Teep!” she cries, ignoring how the dog musses her papers and detritus. “Who’s my good boy, did you have fun at the park? Oops, watch Mummy’s hand there, sweetheart.”

“Why are we watching Mummy’s hand?” calls a voice from the stairwell, and Rythian begins to feel a bit forgotten as a tall, broad woman with curly brown hair steps through the door with a leash in her hands. “Hi, babe,” she says quietly as she accepts a quick kiss from Zoey, and shuts the door behind her.

Zoey waves the offending hand. “Oh, nothing, I just sprained it while I was out earlier, s’nothing to worry about. Did you enjoy your evening playtime?”

The woman shrugs. “I just lobbed a tennis ball around, he’s the one who had all the fun.” She grins, then catches Rythian out of the corner of her eye. “Oh, is this the brooder?”

“I _don’t_ brood!” Rythian exclaims reflexively, then tucks his chin back into his scarf and hunches his shoulders. “I-I mean...”

“Yep! Rythian, this is Fiona. Fiona, this is the vampire I’ve been writing about.”

“Ahh,” Fiona intones, walking toward him and cutting an imposingly huge figure before him. Instinctually, he sniffs, and is surprised he doesn’t smell any blood on her, nor is his skin prickling with the warmth that radiates off humans. “Well, it’s nice to finally meet you, though you’ve been preoccupying my girlfriend pretty thoroughly the last few nights. There’s about eight new journals lying about here because of you.”

“Ah... sorry?” he tries.

She stares at him, her dark eyes cold as stone, and he notices cracks and lines in her skin that mimic the wrinkles of human skin, only more exaggerated. They’re faint, but Rythian grows more confident that Fiona is not human. Then she relaxes and smiles warmly at him, and the cracks seem to complement it. “Well, it’s no bother. She can’t well help it, can she? I’m just happy to see her attract some attention that isn’t a bloody kelpie, selkie or fucking gargoyle, to be quite honest.”

“Fifi!” Zoey whines, from where she’s now seated on the couch, getting enthusiastic kisses from Teep. “That was one time, and I managed to trick my way out of their stupid circle before they got anything out of me, it’s fine!”

“Zozo,” Fiona imitates back at her in the same tone, “they still _dislocated your arm_ , and they’ve not left you alone since! I still sense that gargoyle dick up on our roof sometimes, you know! And that’s not even mentioning Horny-and-Frightening and his interest in you--”

Rythian coughs, fiddling with the tassels of his scarf under their combined gaze. “Uh, why has the Garbage Court been bothering you? I-if it’s alright for me to ask.”

From the couch, Zoey waves her hand again. “Nah, you can ask. You know who the Trash Fae are, right?”

He nods. “Yeah, Trott, Smith and Ross, isn’t it?”

Fiona tenses, having sat on the couch in the space behind Zoey, and Zoey pats her arm around her waist sympathetically. “Don’t worry, Fi, the vampire’s utterance is like it’s reflection: undetectable. Plus, I doubt any of them is as powerful as the Greenhouse Guardian is, saying their names won’t do much more than give them an itch.” She pats the couch and gestures to him, and Rythian sits down, Teep turning and dropping his head in his lap, looking appealingly up at him for scritches. Rythian obliges. “Basically, that’s it for their circle. Their influence isn’t huge. But they’ve a king, right? A king from their midsummer ritual--” Zoey turns in Fiona’s grasp, squeezing one of her hands, asks “it _is_ midsummer, right? Or is it midwinter?” and groans when all she gets is a shrug and a non-commital noise. “Whatever, anyway, a king from this ritual who’s entirely human. Not even like me or Lomadia or any of the witches. Not a drop of magic in his soul. Right?”

She pauses, and Rythian feels as though he’s supposed to be picking up on something here. He’s not. “Ri-right...”

“Oh, for goodness--” she sighs. “Fae are immortal. Humans are...?”

“Mortal,” Rythian supplies, knowing the answer to that one full well, no need to clarify that one with him.

Zoey smacks him. “No brooding. But yes, humans are mortal. So a human king is going to do... what, eventually?”

He watches her expression as he tries, “... Die?”

“Very good! So, these immortal beings pick a mortal king. Keep him longer than they’re supposed to because they are very attached to this guy. What would they need a Seer for? If this mortal is precious to them?”

She’s looking deep into his eyes, waiting for that light bulb to flick on, for that cog to slip into place. Very slowly, it does. “Oh! They’re pestering you about when he’s supposed to die?”

Fiona claps her hands around Zoey’s waist. “Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner, folks!” she announces, enduring Zoey’s smack with grace and a cocky grin. Rythian thinks he likes her.

“Yep, that’s basically it! But they are _not_ nice about it. If they just tried to talk it out with me on neutral, public ground with all terms decided by me weeks beforehand to make sure all deals are airtight and work out heavily in my favour, then we wouldn’t have a problem!” she says, like it’s that simple, and from what Rythian has learned of her lately, she probably makes everything that simple. He admires that.

“So what about the other dude?” he asks after a moment of stroking Teep’s ears, when the curiosity begins to bother him. “The... Greenhouse Guardian? Who’s that?”

On the other end of the couch, Rythian can see Fiona tense again, but harder, and Zoey’s face goes stony. “Now, his name we don’t ever say, not with this threshold so fresh.” Pulling out of Fiona’s arms, Zoey reaches out on the coffee table for a pen and a notebook. She starts sketching as she asks Rythian, “Have you ever been around the residential district on the eastern end of the city?”

“Sure, that’s where my sire lives. She’s got a brownstone a few doors down from Xephos’ place.”

Turning her notebook around, Zoey points the tip of the pen to a building she’s sketched out tucked between two other buildings to the right of an intersection. “Have you ever seen this greenhouse when you visit? Smells like pine even though there is _no_ way there’re enough pines in there for it to smell like that?”

Rythian tries not to let his face screw up too much. “Uh, I don’t know about the smell, but the shop if familiar enough. Nilesy works there, right? I saw him coming out the door there once or twice on my way to my sire’s place.”

“Nilesy works there part-time, but he’s not the owner. He’s working his debt off to a powerful fae lord, and you should count yourself lucky he hasn’t been there when you’ve stopped in. He’s got his roots in half the bloody city by now--”

“If he’s not got the whole city under his thumb already, the bugger,” Fiona adds with a bite.

Zoey nods. “He’s pestering me for the same reason. He’s a big bad faerie, he should be able to divine things for himself, but apparently there’s something about the Trash Court that’s fending him off.”

“Well,” Rythian starts, scratching at his neck, “do you know? What’s gonna happen to their mortal king, I mean.”

She scoffs, bursting into bits of laughter that make Fiona visibly relax behind her. “Gosh, no! I have worked _very_ hard not to look into that for the sake of my safety. I wouldn’t even want to know, I’m sure it will only end in pain for the poor Trash bastards. They really messed up in getting so attached, I didn’t have to be a Seer to see that one coming.”

Rythian’s eyes drift to the notebook, which Zoey places back on the coffee table as she remembers the kettle and goes to pour some lukewarm tea in the kitchen. How many times had he seen that shop, passed it by, and not known what kind of fae operated inside it? What an unsuspecting front for something that seemed to shake Zoey to her core.

On the other end of the couch, Fiona pats her lap and makes kissy noises at Teep, who crawls over to her eagerly. “So,” she says slowly, breaking Rythian’s pensive silence. “Why the scarf?”

Without thinking about it, Rythian tucks his chin down and buries his nose into the folds of the fabric over his mouth.

Bringing three mugs and tea fixings over to the table on what looks like a stolen mall food court tray, Zoey tuts at Fiona. “Leave it. He’s not asking about your cracks, is he?”

“S’fine,” Rythian mutters, working at raising his chin. “Although, I am curious about the cracks. You don’t smell like human.”

Fiona shrugs. “I’m happy to tell him. I’m a golem. I dunno who created me, but a witch taught me to glamour when I lived in the countryside, so I don’t look like clay.” She picks up her tea and sips at it black.

“You being honest and open doesn’t make Rythian comfortable with the same, Fifi,” Zoey chides, dropping spoon after spoon of sugar into her tea with a splash of milk.

Rythian sighs, rubbing the scarf where it rests just under his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Nah, I just... My sire abandoned me a few months after I was turned. Just up and disappeared one night when I woke up. She had, essentially, only enough time to coax me out of a feral state and explain to me what happened, but not enough time to teach me to hunt or show me where to find alternatives.”

“Bitch,” Fiona mutters, and Zoey smacks her again.

“She had her reasons,” Rythian says simply, and shrugs. “I took a human life when I started getting really hungry and made it really messy. I got scared. So I hid and starved myself out of guilt and fear of what I’d become.” He glances up to see both of them looking at him carefully, and he tugs slowly and gently at the scarf. “It, uh...” he says, as he lifts his chin out of the fabric and coughs to cover his embarrassment. “I went a bit rabid and chewed up my lips. The scars just... well, they aren’t that pretty, so I put them away. I’m scary enough as it is.”

When he’d woken up in a special treatment ward at the hospital, the banshee nurse who’d helped him had told him that he’d sustained scarring on his mouth that wouldn’t heal, because he’d been so long without blood in his system to support his healing factor. It was then that he realized he wouldn’t be able to see what they looked like with a mirror, and asked if she could be honest with him and tell him how bad it was. She’d grimaced and handed him a hospital mask, and told him that if he was lucky, a diet high in O-type might heal the scars over centuries.

He’s startled out of his reverie when he feels a hand on his face, startling away from it when he sees the hand in his periphery. “And you’re still friendly with your sire?” Zoey asks, darkly, as she runs her fingers over the dips and tears in his skin, the places where the white of his fans peek out from where the scar tissue recedes.

Rythian casts a glance to Fiona, who grins and shrugs. “Uh, yes? She’s my sire, we have a bond.”

Zoey sits back and Rythian puts the scarf back. “Clearly not strong enough,” she mutters, and Fiona sighs at her.

“Zozo, come on, don’t be like that.”

“Like what? Her progeny was in trouble, and she can’t be bothered to stick around and help him out?” She blows a blast of air out through her lips, and Teep mimics the sound. “Some sire she is.”

Someone starts laughing, and Rythian is startled to slowly come to the conclusion that it’s him. He holds a fist in front of his mouth like he’s coughing, but he can’t stop and he’s very quickly doubled over in his seat, clutching his sides for breath he doesn’t need.

“Uh,” Fiona starts, somewhere above his head, “did you break him, Zo?”

“No!” he manages, somewhat reassuringly. “No, I am fine, I swear!” He struggles to catch his system out of the loop of laughter, slowly easing out of it with gradually quieter chuckles. “I’m fine, I’m sorry.”

Zoey shakes her head, laughing with him still. “No apologies for laughter in this house,” she says simply. “But, uh, what was so funny?”

He reaches out for his tea and takes a sip, calming himself. “Nothing. It’s just... S’just neat to be cared about so quickly.”

The admission silences them, even Teep, and then Zoey is setting her tea down and wrapping Rythian up in a hug. “That is definitely the saddest thing I’ve ever heard, please don’t say things like that anymore!”

When he laughs this time, it’s fond and quiet, as fond as Fiona’s smile at them. “Alright. I’m sorry.”

When she pulls away, Rythian fights a yawn, and looks out the window, then down at his watch. “Aw, Jesus, when did it get to be this early... I’m just barely going to make it back to my place before sunris--” he starts, then cuts himself off as a thought occurs to him. “Wait, shouldn’t you two be asleep?”

Fiona shrugs. “We’re sort of nocturnal here. Zo doesn’t sleep when she’s getting information from the leylines, which is usually in the dead of night, and I don’t need to. Teep’s adjusted himself accordingly.”

“You can use our guest bed, if you’d like!” Zoey offers, clapping her hands together. “There’s no windows, so it’s completely blacked out with the door closed. Then I can show you mushroom divination tomorrow night!”

It’s hard to reject Zoey in the face of her enthusiasm, Rythian learns, and he smiles at her. “Uh, sure. What’s the harm, right? Thank you, Zoey, Fiona.”

“No problem, sleep well, Rythian!” Zoey says, just as Fiona grins and singsongs, “Don’t brood too hard, vampy!”

He closes the door soundly behind him, and wonders: if his heart still beat, would it be swelling right now?

Instead of answering, he falls face first into the bed and snuggles down.


End file.
